The Pork and Worms Conclusion

A colleague of ours recently posed the question in an open forum as to whether or not she should freeze pork before feeding it to her dogs. We rarely answer such questions directly, but on this occasion wanted to help out a friend and her dogs. After posing this question to ourselves many years ago and going to the horses mouth, so to speak, by asking a free range pig farmer, and seeing puppies die from worm burden due to being fed raw sausages, we felt we knew the answer and dutifully wrote:

As expected the inevitable negative response:

The issue is that as this was human grade pork people think it’s worm free: they are wrong!

“Trichinosis has been historically associated with pork”, pigs require ‘worming’ daily, for 7 days, for a 95% efficacy rate, within 3 weeks prior to slaughter; this only happens on very good farms and isn’t really an issue for human consumption anyway as the worms are killed in the cooking process – obviously this does not occur in feeding raw to our pets and in fact slaughter house testing has proven inefficient for worms. Whilst it is true that raw fed pets are more resistant to worms, unless you are absolutely certain of your source we recommend freezing first.